SPY HANDLER
SPY HANDLER
Memoir of a KGB Officer
THE TRUE STORY OF THE MAN WHO RECRUITED ROBERT HANSSEN AND ALDRICH AMES
VICTOR CHERKASHIN with GREGORY FEIFER
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
Copyright © 2005 by Victor Cherkashin
Hardcover first published in 2005 by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
Paperback first published in 2005 by Basic Books
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Designed by Trish Wilkinson
Set in Goudy by the Perseus Books Group
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cherkashin, Victor, 1932–
Spy handler: memoir of a KGB officer : the true story of the man who recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames /Victor Cherkashin with Gregory Feifer.
p. cm.
“A Member of the Perseus Books Group.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
HC: ISBN 13 978-0-465-00968-8; ISBN 0-465-00968-9 (alk. paper)
1. Cherkashin, Victor, 1932- 2. Intelligence officers—Soviet Union—Biography. 3. Espionage, Soviet—History—20th century. 4. Soviet Union. Komitet gosudarstvennoæi bezopasnosti. 5. Intelligence service—Soviet Union 6. Spies—Soviet Union. 7. Soviet Union—Foreign relations. I. Feifer, Gregory. II. Title.
JN6529.I6C49 2005
327.1247'0092—dc22
2004017609
PB: ISBN 13 978-0-465-00969-5; ISBN 0-465-00969-7
05 06 07 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my family—my wife,
children and grandchildren—
to whom I have dedicated my life
PREFACE
Publication of this book comes against great odds, the result of a path on which I embarked at the height of my career. It eventually led me to decide that telling my story was important—for the debate over Cold War espionage as well as for my sake. In addition to my initial reluctance, I had to confront the fact that intelligence work doesn’t lend itself to memoir writing. A political tool since ancient times, intelligence doesn’t normally play an independent public role in affairs of state. Its essence is secrecy. For those like me who have spent their careers in espionage, publicizing its details goes against instinct and tradition.
Usually the public learns the identity of intelligence operatives only when something goes wrong. When operations fail, intelligence officials are often loudly arrested, exposed, or made the subject of a successful setup by the intelligence services of an opposing side.
My name became known in Russia following the arrests of CIA officer Aldrich Ames in 1994 and FBI special agent Robert Hanssen in 2001, both in the United States, several years after I retired from the KGB in 1991. The press in Russia and the United States covered some aspects of my involvement in both espionage cases, but most reports lacked key details and misrepresented facts to fill in the gaps. Meanwhile, my experience (actually, my lack of it) in speaking to journalists who tried to interview me led to an even greater mess. American writers read their own preconceived notions into my words (I purposely left many details vague), while Russians came up with their own explanations. Eventually I stopped giving interviews to the media, and I’m only now ready to tell my full story.
For most of my career, I conducted operations against the Main Adversary—as KGB terminology designated the biggest strategic threat to the Soviet Union. Until World War II, that honor belonged to Great Britain, after which it went to the United States. I operated against both until 1965, when my efforts became solely directed at counteracting CIA activities against the USSR. During those dangerous years, U.S. and Soviet intelligence services often fought on the front lines of the Cold War.
I joined the KGB in 1952, just as that war was heating up and a year before Joseph Stalin died. I retired almost forty years later in 1991, days after the attempted August coup d’état against Mikhail Gorbachev that did so much to help bring down the Soviet Union. My career encompassed Russia’s transformation from a totalitarian dictatorship to a country opening its arms to democracy.
I must warn readers expecting to read about James Bond–style exploits in these pages that I undertook none in my career. Intelligence consists chiefly of workaday routine and, with luck, rare successes. In my many years with the KGB, I met officers, spies and others who subsequently became well-known. But that came in the course of normal duties. I never parachuted out of an airplane, learned how to kidnap or assassinate or how to crack safes. I never took a course on espionage tradecraft. I joined KGB counterintelligence after studying foreign languages and was sent abroad to learn through experience. What follows is the account of a real KGB career.
I have changed some names and omitted others. I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible, but in such accounts it’s not possible to reveal everything. Many of the agents I handled and operations I ran in my career have never been exposed. While I discuss them here, the real names of some must remain secret. I’ve drawn my story almost entirely from memory, and while I’ve done everything possible to ensure that the basic facts of each episode are correctly portrayed, some of the dialogue and actions describe events as they likely happened.
Although I make my views about the KGB, the CIA and Soviet and American politics and affairs clear, I tried to avoid falling into the trap of polemics. This account is not KGB propaganda. Other memoirs and tales of Cold War espionage carry disinformation either purposely or unwittingly gathered from interviews with intelligence officers still intent on misleading the other side. Serving and retired operatives often refrain from correcting bad information—making it seem that they agree—while disseminating more of their own skewed narratives to blur the facts. The nature of espionage makes a certain degree of that inevitable. I try to get beyond the circle of purposeful misinformation to simply tell my own story as I remember it.
I didn’t undertake to write about myself in order to aggrandize my career or the KGB—enough fuss has already been made about my part in Cold War espionage. Aside from the new details in this account, intelligence professionals generally know who I am and understand the significance of my role in KGB history. I wrote for a general Western audience, which has shown more interest in the real facts—the good and the bad of intelligence history—than Russians have. In the past, I’ve been interviewed for several accounts of Cold War espionage. In most cases, my actions and words haven’t been portrayed entirely correctly—not necessarily as a willful decision on the part of the writers, but because they didn’t have all the information. Here is my attempt to correct the record.
I continue to care deeply for the KGB’s reputation. My goal is to clear away some misperceptions about Soviet intelligence, to try to communicate that the KGB was staffed by human beings who made the same mistakes and held the same feelings others did. Most intelligence officers are able to separate their professional and personal feelings. The many years I spent working against the CIA were my contribution to the maintenance of my country as a great power. But that didn’t mean I didn’t respect A
mericans or enjoy the United States. I always believed Americans were trying to do for their country what I was doing for mine.
Finally, I don’t intend this chronicle to be published in Russia, where intelligence professionals are now generally seen more as suspicious “spies” than dedicated officers serving the interests of their country. Many former KGB officers have published memoirs claiming to address public curiosity, where none really exists. Most of these books were vanity projects, presented as the official versions of events. Some of those accounts have tarnished my reputation and those of other former KGB officers, reflecting the politics at work in any bureaucracy. Instead of waiting for future historians to write more balanced analyses of the claims and counterclaims, I decided to tell my story now and enable readers to come to their own conclusions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Victor Cherkashin: I would like to thank my colleagues Yacob Medyannik, Leonid Shebarshin, Stanislav Androsov and all those in intelligence with whom I had the privilege of working and who did so much to help me in my professional life.
Thanks to my former opponents—Milt Bearden, David Major and Jack Platt—for their understanding and their candid analyses of the events in which we all participated. They demonstrated just how far beyond the designation of “main adversaries” we’ve moved.
Thanks to those who helped make the seemingly impossible come true by realizing the manuscript—including Trident Media Group’s book producer Iazamir Gotta, for his professionalism and determination (his ability to keep coming up with reasons to convince me of the project’s feasibility—and then keep it on track).
Thanks to Trident’s Robert Gottlieb, my literary agent, who understood the rationale behind my life and believed in this project. Thanks also to Irina Krivaya, translator-coordinator, who spared no effort and maintained the lines of communication between those cooperating on the manuscript. Thanks also to Trident’s John Silbersack.
Special thanks to Gregory Feifer, who managed to preserve my general tone and narrative direction, while making the book interesting to read. Gregory possesses a rare quality engendering respect and trust without his having to make extra efforts to display artificial enthusiasm. Without his interest in my professional life and the goodwill between us, we would have hardly been able to conduct the frank discussions necessary for writing the manuscript.
Gregory Feifer: I would like to thank Victor Cherkashin for telling his important story, which was a pleasure to write about. Thanks also for his openness and boundless patience with my many questions. Trident Media Group’s Zamir Gotta put this project together and persevered in seeing it through. Thanks to him and Irina Krivaya for her scrupulous transcriptions and many other important duties. Thanks also to Trident’s Robert Gottlieb and John Silbersack for taking me on and their savvy advice.
I’d like to thank those who helped with editing the manuscript, including George Feifer for his matchless line editing and Elizabeth Feifer for her merciless cutting. Special thanks to those who reviewed the manuscript and pointed out my many mistakes, including David Major and Connie Allen of the Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, which also helped with photographs. Thanks also to Phillip Knightley.
Thanks to those who agreed to be interviewed, to my family and to all those who helped with advice and encouragement.
Thanks also to the editors at Basic Books for generating the final product.
PROLOGUE
Betrayal
1
I stood staring at my wife in the small foyer of our new apartment in Krylatskaya, the concrete-block residential district in the southwest of sprawling Moscow. I understood what she just said, but the news took a few seconds to register. Then I went back to my usual routine, taking off my coat and shoes and putting on my slippers. But any sense of normalcy had vanished. What she’d just told me concerned something I thought had been buried in a long-forgotten life. That past now rushed back like a thundering locomotive.
“Aldrich Ames has been arrested.”
Elena repeated it slowly and gravely. I looked at her straight dark hair and handsome, furrowed brow. I’d seen the same expression many times over the years—it indicated she was controlling her emotions. She didn’t have to repeat herself; my blank look should have assured her I’d understood correctly. “I saw it on the news tonight. I wanted to call you, but, well . . .” There was no need to mention our old habit of never saying anything of importance over the telephone, even three years after the collapse of communism, which forever changed our way of life.
I thought back to the first time Ames had surfaced between us, nine years earlier. At the time I didn’t know his real name, and even if I had, I couldn’t have told it to her. She heard about him for the first time on the news and put two and two together. She suspected that something major had happened back then in 1985 because of her work typing secret cable traffic between headquarters at Moscow Center and the KGB station, or rezidentura, in Washington, where I was head of counterintelligence. When I came home that April afternoon, she raised her eyebrows to question me and I replied with one deep nod. That was enough. We’d become veteran practitioners of silent communication by then.
Now, on February 23, 1994—two days after Ames was arrested—the name that had remained unspoken between us until that very minute was being broadcast to the entire world.
I was weary. The gray company Mercedes had dropped me off moments earlier at the row of high-rise apartment blocks where I lived. The buildings were a cut above the standard hastily assembled piles of concrete, with a clean entrance, neat blacktop and walkways instead of the usual potholes and muddy tracks. I had to wrap my coat around me against the invading cold and clammy late winter air.
I’d had a tough day. Running security at one of Moscow’s largest new banks was a nerve-racking business. Overseeing the 150 men who guarded the bank’s main office and various branches was only part of it. My larger job was helping steer the company through the cutthroat world of post-Soviet business at a time when criminal groups made themselves “partners” of almost every business in the capital—when they didn’t seize them outright. Meanwhile, to channel profits from the mad grab for former state property, banks were springing up faster than any other type of company. Bankers were being assassinated almost weekly on Moscow streets. A company’s survival in that murderous atmosphere required the kind of information a former KGB officer was well positioned to provide.
I’d barely had time to adjust to this new life of ours. Elena and I had been true believers in communism, and we shared the idealism and hopes of those around us. I’d always felt the difficulties and cruelty I saw—now in retrospect much easier to isolate and criticize—were a necessary part of the work it took to shore up our socialist state. When we were posted abroad, Elena and I always found the words and proof to defend Soviet achievements—to which we were doing our best to contribute in our own way. Nevertheless, it had been clear for years before the collapse that the Soviet administration had let down the Motherland. Things had to change—the state was so badly mismanaged, it had no choice but to crumble. But not in the way it did, with the robbery and lawlessness that formed the foundation of the new Russia.
I’d dealt with staff problems all day and had to negotiate with some crooked cops, but those concerns now vanished. I was thinking again as I would have in my past life. Making my way to my carefully wallpapered living room, I sat down on a brown velour couch. How could Ames have been compromised? Taking precautions, protecting our precious “assets,” had always been the top priority—indeed the key to having him as an agent. My assurances to Ames on the matter made the difference between running a spy of average importance and one who felt safe enough to hand over some of the best counterintelligence information the KGB had ever netted. How did we fail to protect the man who’d been so crucial to reversing our fortunes?
Ames, who became one of our biggest successes ever, began working for us at a time when the KGB had been cr
ippled by the CIA and the FBI—although we had no idea of the scale of the damage until Ames provided us with that information. He enabled us to turn around and land one major blow after another on the United States. Thanks to Ames, we all but shut down CIA operations in Moscow.
Success like that was never planned. I thought back to when I was a young officer stationed in Lebanon. It took me many months to lay the groundwork to entrap one CIA officer—bugging an apartment he secretly used for his work, befriending his cleaning lady, tracking his moves around the city, taking secret photographs. Even then, the opportunity to use the information I gleaned came years later, when we found him working in West Germany. I traveled to Bonn to meet him, but in the end, he refused my recruitment effort.
Years later, I was still amazed at how it had happened so differently with Ames, how a former head of counterintelligence in the Soviet section of the CIA, with practically unlimited access to the secrets of American intelligence, came looking for us! Various sums have been reported about how much Ames was paid. We considered his efforts worth every penny of the $2.7 million he was actually allocated. As American news reports lamented, he gave us the names of more than twenty spies, selling out every U.S. agent operating on Soviet soil. The ten sentenced to death after his revelations earned him the title of the CIA’s “deadliest spy.” He also placed many other CIA officers at risk and helped undo a number of technologically advanced, multimillion-dollar covert operations in the Soviet Union.
My mind moved quickly back to the present, racing through possible reasons for Ames’s exposure. Perhaps it had been just a matter of time until the inevitable happened. The likeliest cause was a blunder by Russian—that is to say, post-Soviet—intelligence. Plenty of circumstantial evidence in the past could have easily warned the CIA it had a major leak. But even the most obvious signs often don’t lead to exposure. The arrest couldn’t have happened just like that, in the course of normal operations. Surely Ames was betrayed. In that case, the blame lay squarely with us.
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